By Joe Spier
CALGARY, Alberta, Canada — Al Gore was awarded the year 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his wide reaching efforts to draw the world’s attention to the dangers of global warming. Also nominated was Irena Sendler for “rescuing the most vulnerable of an oppressed minority from the horror of totalitarian mass murder”.
During World War II, Irena Sendler rescued some 2,500 Jewish children from the almost certain death of the Warsaw Ghetto. Her story is virtually unknown yet she saved more Jewish lives than did Oskar Schindler and she also had a list.
Irena (Sendlerowa) Sendler was born on February 15, 1910 in a suburb of Warsaw, the only child of a Roman Catholic doctor. Her father was himself a hero, the lone physician who stayed behind during a 1917 typhus epidemic to treat his patients most of whom were poor Jews. He contracted the disease and died. He taught his daughter to respect all people regardless of religion or nationality and told his daughter before he died that “If you see someone drowning, you must jump in and try to save them, even if you don’t know how to swim”.
Irena developed strong loyalties to her Jewish friends even before World War II. At university, the Jewish students were forced to sit separate from their gentile classmates. One day Irena sat with the Jewish students proclaiming, “Today I am Jewish”. She was expelled.
On September 1, 1938, the Nazis invaded Poland. Warsaw fell 27 days later. By October 1940, the Germans had herded the entire Jewish population of Warsaw, about 440,000 people, into a ghetto the size of approximately 100 square city blocks surrounded by walls and barbed wire. The Nazis, initially, were content to let the Jews of the Ghetto die of disease, starvation and random killings. In July 1942, the Germans began systematically to deport the Jews of the Ghetto to the killing camps. The Ghetto was liquidated in April 1943.
Meanwhile even before the creation of the Ghetto, Irena Sendler was helping Warsaw’s Jews. She was a Senior Administrator with the City’s Social Welfare Department responsible for operating canteens for orphans, poor people and the destitute. By German decree, Jews were denied all forms of assistance. Irena, under penalty of death if caught, sought ways to circumvent the Nazi edict. She registered Jewish families under fictitious Christian names and gave them false documents. To prevent inspections she recorded Jewish families as having infectious diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis.
After the creation of the Ghetto, Irena, then 30 and married with 2 children, because of her job as a social worker, was given an all-important special work pass to enter the Ghetto at will. As a show of solidarity with the Jewish people, she donned the compulsory Star of David armband whenever she came into the Ghetto.
By the summer of 1942, Irena was so appalled by the conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the inhabitants were already dying at the rate of some 5,000 a month, that she joined Zegota, the Polish underground resistance organization set up to aid Jews. She was one of its first recruits and was put in charge of the children’s division under the codename Jolanta.
If one day Irena Sendler would bring food to a Jewish family in their apartment, the next day that apartment would be empty, the family already on a train to the death camp at Treblinka. Irena knew she had to act. She could not save the parents but she could save some of the children. With a small group of her most trusted social worker colleagues, she conceived a scheme to smuggle children out of the Ghetto to sanctuary on the Aryan side.
Irena first had the impossibly painful task of persuading parents to part with their children and entrust them to non-Jewish strangers. She could not promise the parents that their child would live but she could promise that if he stayed he would die. Sometimes parents believed the Nazi subterfuge that the trains leaving the Umschlagsplatz were resettling Jews in the east; sometimes mothers could not separate themselves from their children; sometimes one parent would agree and the other would not; sometimes parents would consent only to be met by the grandparents’ adamant refusal. Sometimes Irena would be forced to leave empty handed.
Returning to the Ghetto as often as three times in one day, Irena brought the children out. She did so in ingenious ways, through sewers and underground tunnels, hiding under stretchers in ambulances, in gunnysacks, trunks and suitcases, in coffins and body bags and on one occasion, a baby in a mechanic’s toolbox. Small children had to be sedated to keep them from crying.
On reaching the Aryan side, in general, the children were first placed in a temporary shelter where they were taught Catholic rituals while awaiting their forged birth and baptismal certificates prepared by Zegota. Each child was given a fake family history, which the older ones had to commit to memory. The older children were then sheltered in Catholic orphanages or convents and the younger ones placed with Christian families willing to risk being executed by the Germans if found out.
Life for the children and their protectors constituted a cycle of constant fear and frequent danger as their hiding places were subject to random searches by the Gestapo and some children would never pass as Christian because they did not speak Polish. Sometimes the children had to hide in locked closets for hours. Irena was aware of children surviving only because they were able to hang onto external window ledges with numb hands until the Nazis left the home of their adoptive parents.
On October 20, 1943, Irena Sendler’s luck ran out. Having been betrayed, her house was surrounded by German soldiers who arrested her and took her first to the Gestapo cellars in Szucha Street and later to the infamous Pawiak prison. She was severely tortured by the Gestapo, who wanted the names of the Zegota leaders and the others involved in her network. Both of her legs and feet were broken but not her spirit. Irena revealed nothing. She still bears the scars and the disability of her torture.
Irena Sendler was sentenced to death. Unknown to Irena, the Zegota had paid a large bribe to the guard who was driving her to her execution. He threw her out of the car and recorded her name as having been executed. Next day the Germans proudly proclaimed her death, announcing her execution on posters plastered all over Warsaw. Later the Gestapo found out about the ruse and furiously searched for her even going to her mother’s funeral, which Irena could not attend. Irena stayed in hiding until the liberation of Warsaw, but continued what work she could for Zegota.
Others saved the lives of Jewish children by hiding them with Christian families, but none did what Irena Sendler did. Determined that the children maintain their Jewish identity and that some day they be reunited with the Jewish community, Irena made lists. Each evening, as a Jewish child was placed in a convent, orphanage or foster home, Irena wrote their original name, new Polish identity and location on a thin, narrow strip of paper, which she placed in a jar and later buried in a colleague’s yard under an apple tree. After the war, the jars were dug up and the strips of paper counted. There were 2,500. Irena and her co-conspirators had saved the lives of 2,500 Jewish children.
After the war a few of the children were reunited with relatives, some elected to remain with their foster families, a number are missing, either failing to survive or alive unaware of their Jewish identities but most were sent to Jewish orphan homes and gradually made their way to Palestine on the illegal blockade running ships.
In 1965, Yad Vashem bestowed upon Irena Sendler the title of “Righteous Amongst the Nations” as one who acted according to the noblest principles of humanity by risking her life to save Jews during the Holocaust. In 1991, she was made an honorary citizen of Israel and in 2003, received Poland’s highest civilian decoration, the “Order of the White Rose.” In 2007, Irena Sendler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, a nomination supported by Polish President Lech Kaczynski and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
Irena Sendler passed away on May 12, 2008 at the age of 98.
The Nobel Peace Prize Committee, in failing to honor Irena Sendler, missed an opportunity to recognize one of the last living representatives of the few, who when confronted by the greatest killing machine of the 20th century, rose to reveal simple morality, indomitable spirit and great courage in the face of unparalleled evil. Not so much to honor the past as to demonstrate a path to emulate for the future.
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Spier is a retired lawyer with a keen interest in Jewish history. You may contact him via joe.spier@sdjewishworld.com